They announced that we had to evacuate the city immediately
Canada was freezing. As someone who grew up in a warm climate in Turkey and on the Aegean coast, I was freezing.
I had a 7-day trip to Canada for a business trip. The first night I stayed at Hotel Zero1 in Montreal, in the city center opposite the entrance to Chinatown.
The view was super, you could see the whole of Chinatown from above. I could also see the view of the city because I was on the top floor.
By the way, my old readers know but I would like to summarize briefly for the new ones.
I have been working as an International Project Manager in a Global Company for many years and I have the opportunity to travel all over the world. I have the opportunity to see at least 2 new countries and I visit about 7–8 countries Every year
I visit my office in Germany regularly every month.
As of now, I am living in Turkey, but in the near or medium term, I have the possibility of moving to Germany completely. After this brief information, let’s come to the details of my visit to Canada and the interesting memories I experienced;
After a brief cultural briefing on Quebec, let’s talk about my story;
I arrived in Canada in the evening and if I slept directly due to jetlag, I would wake up at night and I tried to go to bed as late as possible on the first day to overcome this. I decided to visit the city center and Chinatown.
Since it was evening, many shops were starting to close and only the places where I could eat were open. I was very bitter and I found a Korean restaurant to eat and ate well.
Then I explored the city on foot for a few kilometers and went back to my hotel and had a good sleep.
The next day I had half a day off before meeting my colleagues and I explored the back streets of the city to do some shopping. I found a store called Dollarama and it was a store made for tourists.
You can find a lot of Canadian items that you can buy for only $1. If you go there one day, you should definitely keep it in mind.
Anyway, after buying a few things and souvenirs I headed to the hotel to meet my friends.
After the meeting in the Hotel Lobby, we started a 2-hour car journey to Drummondville.
Drummondville — Quebec is really different place.
When you enter this region you feel like you have been transported out of America and into Europe. The unit of measurement goes from miles to kilometers and everything is completely in line with European standards.
Later I learned that this was actually a French community. In other words, the states on the east coast of America were the first settlements of the Europeans who arrived in the country.
This is the same for Canada. However, the difference from America is that the Europeans who came to Canada were both French and English from the very beginning. The French settled in Quebec, Canada’s largest province. They preserved both their native language and details such as units of measurement.
Although Montralda is in Quebec, I have never seen so much European inspiration.
Even the simplest KFC had a different name and it was PFK.
They were obviously clear about living their own culture.
Anyway, we arrived at our hotel in Drummondville. After unpacking our stuff, we were 10 minutes away from the area where our meeting would take place.
On the morning of the 3rd day of our 4-day program, one of our friends came excitedly and said that we should leave here immediately. We were scared and tried to understand what was happening and asked why.
He said that there was an announcement about the city and that there was a very big storm and tornado warning and that there would be a curfew. If he did not leave the city immediately, he would have to stay there until the storm passed.
So we decided to go back to Montreal immediately and we decided to continue our meeting at the Montreal Airport Sheraton Hotel inside the Montreal Airport. This was very safe for all of us because staying in the hotel inside the airport was a great advantage for transportation.
When we saw the news about the storm on TV in the evening, we realized that we had made a very good decision and we were glad we had come back.
In the meantime, I would like to share an important experience I had about Canada for those who will visit for the first time.
Canada is one of the places with underground shopping malls and one of the largest underground living spaces in the world. My discovery of this made me feel a little cold.
If you enter the underground in one of the subway stations, you can see that while everyone is cold above, you can walk around in t-shirts below. It took me a day to discover this 🙂
Here below you can see some pictures from my camera about Canada
